ENGLISH COMMENTARY
interpretation of what he says here and in ch. 17. In other places he identifies this Divinity with mind, what Locke calls 'that thinking thing within you', that which in Aristotle's De Anima alone survives death, because it belongs to universal mind. Marcus has asserted in ch. 1 that the mind of man is a particle of divine origin. This, strictly taken, must mean something material, however much refined, and the doctrine would agree with what many Stoics held, that the infant at birth inhales the mind element from the circumambient atmosphere. This would conform with what Marcus says elsewhere of the destiny of the soul at the dissolution which is death.[1] He seems to think of the souls as becoming reabsorbed into the air and so into the ultimate fire. But his physical and material view is not in question here. He seems to be conscious of the indwelling of a divine spirit, not merely of a divine understanding nor of a part of the world substance and world soul.
There are similar expressions, belonging to a devotional manner of thought, not only in many Roman Stoics, but also in the Greek thinkers of that school, and before them in Plato. Thus Manilius says: 'into whom God descends and dwells',[2] and Lucan: 'full of the God, whom he bore in his silent mind.'[3] Seneca, still more remarkably, says: 'God is near you, is with you, is within . . . a sacred spirit resides within us, observer and guardian of our good and ill', and again he speaks of 'God, a guest within man's body'.[4] Even more plainly Epictetus asserts: 'Zeus has set every man's divinity to care for him, and to be his guardian: this divinity sleeps not and cannot be controverted'; and again 'the God is within and your divinity within'.[5] Similar thoughts are already in Plato's Timaeus, whether derived from contemporary religious speculation or from Pythagorean and Orphic influences, and many now think that Xenocrates, a successor of Plato in the Academy, developed this 'daemonizing' side of his master and that it passed into Stoicism through the labours of Cicero's teacher Posidonius. The latter said: 'the cause of passions, that is of disagreement (with Nature) and of an unhappy life, is not to follow always the deity in man, which is akin to and has a similar nature with that which governs the whole universe.'[6]
